How to Export iPhone Floor Plans to CAD (DXF, PDF & SVG)

If you've ever stood in an empty unit with a tape measure, a clipboard, and a sinking feeling that you'd be redrawing the whole thing in CAD that night, you already understand the problem this guide solves. Field measurement is slow, error-prone, and the data lands in your software as a stack of handwritten dimensions you still have to translate into geometry.

An iPhone with a LiDAR sensor changes that. You walk the space, the phone builds a measured 3D model of the room as you go, and Lidar Scanner turns that scan into a clean 2D floor plan you can export straight into your CAD tooling as DXF, hand to a client as PDF, or drop into a design file as SVG. This guide covers exactly how that export works, what each format is good for, and the scale, units, and orientation details that matter when the drawing has to be correct, not just pretty.

Why CAD-Ready Floor Plans Matter

For architects, AEC teams, facilities managers, and interior designers, the floor plan is the foundation document. Almost every downstream task depends on it: space planning, furniture layouts, MEP coordination, renovation scopes, lease drawings, and as-built records all start from an accurate plan of what's actually there.

The catch is that "what's actually there" rarely matches the drawings on file. Older buildings have been renovated, walls have moved, and the original CAD files are missing or wrong. So the work begins with a site survey, and that survey has traditionally meant one of two things: hire a measurement service or draftsman to come out and document the space, or do it yourself with a laser distance meter and a notebook. Both are workable. Both are also slow and expensive relative to how routine the task is.

A LiDAR scan compresses that survey into a few minutes of walking. More importantly, it produces geometry, not just numbers. Instead of a list of wall lengths you have to reconstruct, you get a top-down plan with walls, doors, windows, and openings already drawn in the correct positions and proportions. When that plan exports as a DXF, you open it in your CAD program and you're editing real linework on day one instead of starting from a blank model space. If you're new to capturing rooms this way, start with how to scan a room in 3D with iPhone LiDAR to get the capture itself dialed in first.

What Lidar Scanner Exports

Lidar Scanner generates a 2D top-down floor plan automatically from your LiDAR room scan, then lets you export that plan in three vector formats. They aren't redundant; each one is aimed at a different point in your workflow.

DXF — for AutoCAD, LibreCAD, and the rest of the CAD world

DXF (Drawing Exchange Format) is the lingua franca of CAD. Autodesk created it specifically as an interchange format so drawings could move between programs, and almost every CAD tool on the market reads and writes it: AutoCAD, LibreCAD, BricsCAD, DraftSight, QCAD, ArchiCAD, Revit (via import), Vectorworks, and more.

When you export a floor plan as DXF from Lidar Scanner, you get true vector geometry: walls, openings, and the rest of the plan as lines and polylines you can snap to, trim, extend, and dimension like any other CAD entity. This is the format to choose whenever the plan is going to be edited downstream, used as a base for a new design, or coordinated with other drawings. It's the difference between tracing over an image and working with the actual lines.

DXF export is part of the Pro feature set in Lidar Scanner. See pricing for what's included in each tier.

PDF — for print and client handoff

PDF is the format for communicating a plan rather than editing it. A floor plan exported as PDF is a clean, scaled drawing that prints predictably, opens on any device without special software, and looks the same for everyone who receives it. That makes it the natural choice for client handoffs, contractor packets, lease exhibits, permit submissions that accept PDF, and anything you want to email knowing the recipient can open it without owning CAD software.

Because the PDF is generated from vector geometry, it stays sharp at any zoom level and prints crisply whether you output it at letter size for a quick reference or tile it across larger paper for the field.

SVG — for web, design, and presentation

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the web-and-design-friendly option. It's a vector format that drops cleanly into Figma, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Sketch, and Inkscape, and it renders natively in any browser. Reach for SVG when the floor plan is going into a listing page, a pitch deck, a marketing one-pager, a moodboard, or any design context where you want to restyle the plan — recolor walls, add your own typography, overlay a furniture concept — without it turning into a pixelated raster image.

A good rule of thumb: DXF when someone will build on the drawing, PDF when someone will read it, SVG when someone will restyle it.

Step-by-Step: From Scan to Export

Here's the full path from an empty room to a CAD file. The capture and the export are two distinct stages, and getting the capture right is what makes the export worth having.

1. Scan the room. Open Lidar Scanner and start a room scan. Move slowly along the walls, keeping the phone pointed at the surfaces, and follow the live on-screen guidance as RoomPlan detects walls, doors, windows, and openings in real time. The app supports both Standard and High-Fidelity capture quality — for floor plans destined for CAD, High-Fidelity is worth it because cleaner wall geometry means cleaner exported linework. For technique that keeps your geometry square and your dimensions trustworthy, work through the LiDAR scanning tips for accurate iPhone scans.

2. Let the floor plan generate. When you finish the scan, Lidar Scanner produces a 2D top-down floor plan automatically. Walls, doors, windows, and openings are placed for you based on what the LiDAR captured. No tracing, no manual reconstruction.

3. Refine in the editor (optional but recommended). Before exporting, open the floor-plan editor to clean things up — square a wall, add room labels, drop in furniture, or correct anything the scan misread. More on the editor below.

4. Open the export options. From the plan, choose the export action and pick your format: DXF, PDF, or SVG.

5. Send it wherever it needs to go. Lidar Scanner uses the native iOS share sheet, so you can AirDrop the file to your Mac, save it to Files or iCloud Drive, attach it to an email, or push it into whatever app you use to manage drawings. Because everything is processed on-device, your scan never leaves your phone unless you choose to share it.

The whole loop — scan, generate, export — happens on the device, offline. There's no upload step, no cloud round-trip, and no waiting on a server to process your survey. For a fuller picture of the capture-to-export pipeline, see how it works.

Opening Your DXF in CAD Tools

Once you've exported a DXF, opening it is the easy part — every major CAD application treats DXF as a first-class file.

• AutoCAD: Use File > Open and select the DXF directly, or Insert > DXF to bring it into an existing drawing. The floor plan comes in as editable geometry you can snap to and modify.
• LibreCAD (free, open source): Open the DXF directly. LibreCAD is a solid free option if you don't have an AutoCAD seat and just need to view, measure, or lightly edit the plan.
• QCAD, BricsCAD, DraftSight: All open DXF natively with the same File > Open flow.
• Revit: Use Insert > Import CAD to bring the DXF in as an underlay you can trace walls over, or as a reference for modeling the space.
• Vectorworks / ArchiCAD: Both import DXF as part of their standard interchange support.

When the drawing opens, the first thing to do is a sanity check on scale and units (covered next), then a quick Zoom Extents to confirm the whole plan came in and nothing landed off in the distance.

Scale, Units, and True-North Notes

This is the section that separates a floor plan you can trust from one that just looks right. Three things to verify on every export.

Scale and units

A LiDAR scan is measured in the real world, so the geometry carries real dimensions. When you bring the DXF into CAD, confirm that your drawing units are interpreting those dimensions correctly — that a wall the app measured at 4 meters reads as 4 meters (or the correct imperial equivalent) in your CAD program, not 4 millimeters or 4 inches. CAD applications assign meaning to the raw numbers in a DXF based on the drawing's unit settings, so a quick check with the measure/dimension tool against a wall you know the length of is the fastest way to catch a units mismatch before it propagates into everything you draw on top.

If your office works in imperial and the scan came in metric (or vice versa), set the import or insertion units accordingly so the geometry scales rather than just relabels. Measure one known dimension after import as a final confirmation.

True north and orientation

Lidar Scanner can tag scans with location metadata — GPS position plus a true-north compass heading captured from the device — so the floor plan can be oriented correctly rather than aligned to whichever direction you happened to start scanning. This matters more than it sounds. For solar studies, site plans, daylighting, and any drawing that has to relate to the real-world compass, knowing which way is north is not optional.

The app also reverse-geocodes the location into a readable address, which is handy for labeling the drawing and keeping multiple site surveys straight in your records. When you bring the plan into CAD, decide whether you want it oriented to true north or rotated to "plan north" (square to the page) for readability, and rotate as needed — but keep a note of the captured north so you don't lose the real-world orientation.

A note on accuracy expectations

LiDAR room scanning is fast and impressively close to reality, but it's a survey-grade convenience, not a replacement for a calibrated total station on projects where millimeter precision is contractual. Treat the exported plan as an excellent, measured starting point: verify critical dimensions that drive fabrication or structural decisions, and lean on the captured geometry for the layout, proportions, and the 95% of the drawing that's about getting the space documented quickly and correctly.

The Floor-Plan Editor: Geometry, Labels, and Objects

Before you export, Lidar Scanner's interactive floor-plan editor lets you refine the auto-generated plan so the CAD file you hand off is clean. The editor has three modes.

• Geometry mode — adjust the structural plan itself: walls, corners, doors, windows, and openings. If the scan slightly misjudged a wall or you want to square up a corner, this is where you fix it. Grid snap and on-screen measurements keep edits dimensionally honest, and undo/redo means you can experiment without fear.

• Labels mode — name your rooms (Kitchen, Bedroom 2, Mechanical) and annotate the plan. Labeled rooms make the exported DXF or PDF immediately legible to whoever opens it, and they save you from captioning everything by hand later in CAD.

• Objects mode — place furniture and fixtures from the built-in catalog to communicate layout intent. The editor also calculates area, so you get room and total square footage without manually computing it — useful for space programming, lease drawings, and quick feasibility checks.

The editor's grid snap, measurement readouts, and area calculation mean the plan you export is already tidied to the level you need, rather than something you have to reconstruct in CAD before it's presentable.

Tips for Better CAD Exports

A few habits that make the difference between a usable export and a frustrating one:

• Scan at High-Fidelity for anything CAD-bound. The extra geometric detail translates directly into cleaner walls and openings in the exported linework.
• Close the loop when you scan. Walk the full perimeter and return to where you started so the room geometry closes cleanly. Open-ended scans can leave gaps that show up as imperfect corners in the plan.
• Fix geometry in the editor, not in CAD. It's faster to square a wall in Geometry mode while you still have the scan context than to second-guess it later in model space.
• Capture the location for orientation. Letting the app tag true north up front saves you guessing at rotation when the drawing has to relate to the real site.
• Choose the format for the job. Don't export a PDF and then wish you could edit it — if there's any chance the plan needs CAD work, take the DXF (and you can always export the PDF too).
• Verify one known dimension after import. Thirty seconds with the measure tool against a wall you trust confirms your units are right before you build on the file.
• Keep the original scan. Your scan library holds the source capture, so you can re-export in a different format or re-edit the plan later without re-surveying. Pro removes the saved-scan limit if you're documenting a lot of spaces.

If you're weighing LiDAR against other capture methods for survey work, the comparison in LiDAR vs photogrammetry is worth a read — for measured floor plans, LiDAR's metric accuracy is the deciding factor. And if real estate is your use case specifically, the workflow in using iPhone LiDAR for real estate floor plans walks through scanning a whole property for listings.

Bringing It Together

CAD-ready floor plans used to mean a site visit, a measurement service or a tape measure, and an evening of redrawing. With an iPhone LiDAR scan, you walk the space once and export a measured DXF you can open in AutoCAD or LibreCAD, a PDF you can hand straight to a client, or an SVG you can restyle in a design tool — all generated on-device, all from the same scan. Refine it in the editor, mind your scale and true north, and the drawing that lands in your CAD program is a real starting point instead of a blank file. Explore the full feature set to see how room scanning, the floor-plan editor, and exports fit together.

Lidar Scanner is available on the App Store. If you survey spaces for a living — or you're just tired of the tape measure — download it from the App Store and turn your first room scan into a CAD file today.